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Ex. 5
I’ve gotta say – how anyone ever got the idea that becoming a Christian would make life easier is beyond me. God told us in so many ways that the opposite is true. This passage is one of many examples. Because of their obedience to God in approaching Pharaoh, the Israelites’ situation immediately worsened. Definitely not the expected outcome! Thus, Moses raised his complaint to God. “…why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me?…You have not delivered Your people at all.” (Ex. 5:22b, 23b). What I heard as I read Moses’ complaint was, “Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper? What’s the point in trying to live a Godly life?” That’s a complaint that we hear everywhere, and it’s essentially the same complaint that we get from the book of Job.
The thing is, God never promised us an easy life. He did, however, promise us a better one; a real, abundant, eternal life. And He promised to be with us and see us through the difficult path to that life. That’s the point of His call to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 31:6. “Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble at them, for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.” It’s a call to hold fast to faith in spite of difficult circumstances. And it’s a promise of a hope that cannot fail.
And what did Jesus have to say about it? We read it a couple days ago. “Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man.” (Lk. 6:22). Did you catch that? Blessed. We are blessed, not in spite of our hardship, but because of it. So rather than pitching fits and asking “Why?” when things get hard, we need to put our energy into simply obeying God. With that change of focus, we will learn to see the blessing in the struggle. Yes, a life of following Christ means following Him to the cross as well as into glory. Not easy. But definitely worth it.
Luke 8
The word, “mystery”, crops up quite a bit in the New Testament. I looked it up. 28 times is what I’m told. Jesus uses the word in relation to knowledge of the Kingdom of God in this passage. Elsewhere it defines other principles, such as faith, Christ, God’s will and wisdom, the gospel, Godliness, and even lawlessness. So why is it that all these things are described as mysteries?
I looked the word up and found that the root of the Greek word means, “to shut the mouth”, or, “to keep a secret”. That makes sense because all the things the Old Testament reveals about our relationship with God and His plan to fix it through Christ only come to light in hindsight. The characters who played out God’s life-sized parable could not possibly have known the connections. Thus, they were secrets until they were revealed in Jesus.
That doesn’t seem like enough to me, though. If Christ revealed these secrets, why, then, are they still mysteries? And why did Jesus continue to use parables to explain God’s truths? I saw another definition of the word, “mystery” that gives me something of an answer to those questions. From vocabulary.com I read, “A mystery is something that baffles our understanding”. Aha! Even when God reveals His secrets, they remain beyond our understanding. As Jesus told His disciples, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.” (Lk. 8:10). Because God’s ways are not like ours, His infinite truths boggle our finite minds. As with the disciples, understanding comes only through a relationship with Jesus, the cipher of every mystery.
Job 22
I don’t get this. Job could think of no wrongdoing on his part to warrant his current state of devastation, so Eliphaz felt the need to provide a list for him? These are very direct accusations! How did they get to this point? As I mentioned with Job’s initial lament, things definitely escalated! What drove that escalation? As far as I can tell, it was pride. Job challenged the friends’ belief system and that made them angry. It’s the same reason the Jewish leaders got so angry with Jesus.
The problem with the friends’ belief system is what I just mentioned from today’s Exodus reading. It falsely assumed that obedience to God results in an easy life. It also wrongly assumed that the mysteries of God are within our own ability to grasp. Rather than admit the faults in their beliefs, however, their pride made Job a stumbling block to them. However uncaring, unkind, and unreasonable Job’s friends seem, though, they reveal our own human nature to us. The question then is, how do we respond to a hard truth that challenges what we want to believe?